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Reaching in the ways that reaching has been possible, this back-and-forth exchange is born from an investment in the burgeoning and embodied knowledges that arise as we move through this time of physical distance, self-isolation, and fear. We want to capture something of the beingness of our days and the means we avail in order to cope, believing that repercussions cascade, yoking how we move now to the worlds that await us.

The proposition of recovery risks connotations of “conquest” and that is not the concern here. Rather, here, recovery is what is made in the ashes; it is what can be taken from collapse and used as tinder to light new fires. Oriented in this way, recovery is a practice of setting the stage for what comes after.

In these days of plague, recovery is not to be well (or not only), but to be fragile with bald-faced humility. It is to reveal what is already present, and to inculcate a consequential care beyond its usual limits.

This kind of recovery, if it is to be recovery at all, follows the contours of a body to where its limits break, which is to say that those limits were never solid to begin with. The passage of this new illness, invisible as it often is, relies on the permeability of flesh. And so we inculcate new choreographies. The making of a meaningful life, albeit different for all, relies upon the structure of a day. And so we find ourselves struggling to give shape to these days and weeks, hoping this is only passage, leading to an elsewhere, otherwise. Recovery is also to give credence to what has always been, which is to accept the savvy of our systems to conceal themselves to all but those who suffer by them—easier to imagine than to enact for those who stand as beneficiaries. This, then, is now the labour of fragility, to invest in making these kinds of recognitions possible, knowing anew that these systems structure us all, unevenly, and that what has been an easy ignorance will no longer do.

The temporal proposition of patience seems at odds with recovery: patience is rooted in a present-tense practice that moves with a belief in an afterward, while recovery weaves connective tissue that reaches from the now to somewhere else, backward in time.

If patience is configured as beingness in a state of delay, then can it also be a silent expression of belief that holds between a small speck of light, far away, and the surrounding void of unknowing that calls itself the unspooling hours of days?

Life seems to unfold only in this moment of pivot, impossibly extended, an interstitial space that has become all things. The proportions are off.

Patience, perhaps obviously, is the only way to reach any kind of afterward, and patience will come, either invited or imposed. I would do well to orient myself to its gestures. Conversely, cruelly, recovery cannot be promised or enforced. The least I can do is orient myself to its possibility, a practice that tends to social life as much as it does to personal well-being.

There are different languages in which to offer an explanation of recovery: the scientific and its offer of careful measures; the social and its obligations of mutual assuredness; the political and its promises of security and aid. In the tongue of poetry, consider (as others have before) that it is by keeping a memory of a virus that a body becomes immune.11Claire Fontaine, “Letters against Separation: Claire Fontaine in Italy,” e-flux conversations, March 26, 2020, https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/letters-against-separation-claire-fontaine-in-italy/9701.

Memory is the mutated and calcified remains of encounter. The imperfect memory, the distorted memory—these become metaphors for the question of whether or not exposure will confer immunity as it has sometimes done so before, in other times, for other illnesses. The metaphors available for perfect recall are less obvious, foremost because it is understood that every history, as a collection of memories either personal or collective, is necessarily insufficient to the events it intends to describe. But there are interventions and alignments to be made that, in making a history more complex, get closer to the spirits of encounter that make up its mattering. It might be that these recalibrations that look back critically can stand in relation to some future moment when vaccine circulates among us, a kind of knowledge that has welcomed all cracks in its logic for the strength that an address confers.

These days, in this interstitial space where the scientific, social, and political contours of recovery are not yet fully understood, where it still might be possible to bear upon their practice and shape, perhaps poetry can afford an exceptional space to tend to memories that have yet to come, to conjure momentum that will accept nothing less than to recall a future otherwise than the past we’ve left behind.